I'm not sure if this is the right forum section for this announcement. Administrators are free to shift it elsewhere, where the most appropriate.

I have put online some material I have collected during all this time, put in text form plus images (both made by myself both borrowed from other sites with permission) and loaded on the net.

The site is named NAMING NEW WORLDS and deals about how to name extrasolar planets. Some time ago NuclearVacuum did something similar in blog form. Since I am not so expert in web design, I'm not sure if you can also post comment on this site for suggestion/criticism.

I'm aware this topic has very different schools of thought - with the IAU's one most prevalent - but I wished to show my ideas about how naming the extrasolar planets, a topic that intrigues me much. The naming proposals have also been collected in book form, perhaps soon to be published in my country (editorial times are very slooooow here...on Tau Ceti d...*lol* , but text is protected by copyright).

There are some artistic rendering of extrasolar planets and personal proposals to name extrasolar planets following a homogeneous criterion. The website is partly complete, but still under construction.

Just a brief look as I'm low on free time at the moment, but when you discuss circumbinary planets, you mention NN Ser ABb and NN Ser ABc. I would argue these would probably best be written as NN Ser (AB)b and NN Ser (AB)c respectively.

The reason being that if there was a quadruple system system, Castor A> Castor AA> Castor ABCastor B> Castor BA> Castor BB

A planet named "Castor ABb" would seem to imply orbiting Castor AB, as opposed to the entire Castor system.

I don't anticipate such examples will be common, but maybe you see what I'm getting at.

Personally my preference would be to designate the objects as c and d.

In the case that we find that a circumbinary planet is in fact a star in a face-on orbit it is then possible to switch the designation to upper-case, still be in line with the star designation system and crucially for the information age retain searchability of the designation (most search-engines are case-insensitive).

But yeah, good luck with the website. Might get round to doing one of my own one of these days...

Sirius_Alpha wrote:Just a brief look as I'm low on free time at the moment, but when you discuss circumbinary planets, you mention NN Ser ABb and NN Ser ABc. I would argue these would probably best be written as NN Ser (AB)b and NN Ser (AB)c respectively.

The reason being that if there was a quadruple system system, Castor A> Castor AA> Castor ABCastor B> Castor BA> Castor BB

A planet named "Castor ABb" would seem to imply orbiting Castor AB, as opposed to the entire Castor system.

I don't anticipate such examples will be common, but maybe you see what I'm getting at.

Just forgot to type parenthesis.

Apart from this, what's your impression about this site? Is there anything I should add/edit? Do you find the argument interesting?

I'm not terribly convinced that exoplanets need names, but I do think I understand what you're trying to do. It's an interesting goal.

The alphabet includes 26 letters, from A to Z and the four-letters combinations are estimated to exceed thousands of billions. Just doing the math, 426=4.5[sup]15. If we were using ten letters we would have 1026 possible combinations!

A hypothetical planet orbiting, to say, star SAO 14151 could have a name like Adaea, whereas a planet orbiting HIP 85671 could be named Ifgha. Though apparently easy and comfortable, it may however create weird cacophonic combinations. A putative planet orbiting star HIP 8865 could not be named Hhig, neither a hypothetical HIP 77861 b could not have a name like Gghfa! A possible solution would be the sum of certain numerical sequences: HIP 77861, 7 + ( 7 + 8 ) + 6 + 1 = Gofa.

What you might consider is listing star catalogues into a heirarchy (HD first, HIP second, SAO third) etc, and taking the first available name for the planet. Then take the prime factorisation of the number of the star, and correlate each prime number with a syllable.

I have studied several options for the text and this one appears the "best-fit", using a common scientifical term. Especially accounting the limitations of a GoogleSites free website. As I said "ad maiora", hoping a future better domain.

If I suceed in a editorial operation, I could try to make (or even to commision with personal superivision) a more complex website based on the model of former Extrasolar Visions, with also individual exoplanets page, discovery facts, artwork and so on. A 100 Mb domain implies some limitations

uh, when pasting the text the 1015 has not been transferred from original text. Thanks for the notify.

What you might consider is listing star catalogues into a heirarchy (HD first, HIP second, SAO third) etc, and taking the first available name for the planet. Then take the prime factorisation of the number of the star, and correlate each prime number with a syllable.

Sirius_Alpha wrote:Then why not name the stars while you're at it? USNO-B1.0 0914-00450742 isn't much easier to write.

I remember that another guy already did it, but I need to do some research to find the link.

Apart from that, this is a good website on an interesting domain. It's somewhat "weird" that there are words like "Mappa del sito" or "Cerca nel sito" among english sentences, but it's just a personal thought. Anyways, Ctrl-D'ed to my computer.

This is a topic I wrote on, three or four years ago. Below is a portion of one short post I had made at another site in 2008:

It's a shame that no logical exoplanetary nomenclature has been adopted. Instead the system used for multiple stellar systems is being used, which causes confusion (is HDxxxxxxb a planet or a star?) and includes only two pieces of information: primary and order of discovery.

I would have suggested something like the following:

STAR NAME Pxx (YEAR DISCOVERERS)

Where "P" indicates a planetary-mass object and "xx" indicates ten times the base ten logarithm of the orbital period in days.

For example, the current nomenclature for the 55 Cnc A system looks like this (ordered by increasing planetary orbital period):

55 Cnc A e55 Cnc A b55 Cnc A c55 Cnc A f55 Cnc A d

Whereas the example nomenclature would look like this (also ordered by increasing orbital period):

Mongo wrote:Whereas the example nomenclature would look like this (also ordered by increasing orbital period):...Giving four pieces of information: primary, orbital period, year of discovery and discovery team.

So what do you do when the supposed RV planet's signal is found to be an alias of a true signal at a different period? Remember Gliese 581 d was suspected to be an alias of a planet at a period of ~1 day.

We do not want the names of exoplanets to represent current knowledge about them -- it's too easy to find ourselves having to change it later.

Sirius_Alpha wrote:So what do you do when the supposed RV planet's signal is found to be an alias of a true signal at a different period? Remember Gliese 581 d was suspected to be an alias of a planet at a period of ~1 day.

We do not want the names of exoplanets to represent current knowledge about them -- it's too easy to find ourselves having to change it later.

I would still go ahead and use this system. Aliases of orbital periods do not seem to be that frequent (and go away with increasing coverage), and I would consider the trade-off of an occasional change in a single planet's designation, for a far more informative designation system, to be worthwhile.

If it is considered vital to be able to search for all designations of a given planet, regardless of changes in its presumed orbital period, why not prefix a sequential "order of planetary discovery" to the designation, so that

55 Cnc A P12 (1996 Butler, Marcy, Williams, Hauser, Shirts)

becomes

x9 55 Cnc A P12 (1996 Butler, Marcy, Williams, Hauser, Shirts)

(assuming that it was in fact the 9th extrasolar planet to be announced) so that whatever its orbital period is changed to, it would always be found by searching for "x9 55 Cnc A".